Carbide Tipped Pens

by Ben Bova

  “And this ‘infrastructure’—what’s its origin?”

  * * *

  Whenever we find traps that have been run out on their chains we pull them back onto the bank. Using his gripper-hook prosthetic left hand with the dexterity of a surgeon gaping an incision, Mark has shown me how to prize open like steel clamshells the sprung traps and remove from those metal jaws the beached pi-rats, slick and red-brown and stiff.

  * * *

  “A poet of Old Earth once said that love does not alter when it alteration finds nor bend with the remover to remove. I don’t know if it’s really true for love—divorce’ll sure make you question that—but it’s definitely not true for the universe. Everything the Raveleras do, with the help of their ‘entheogens,’ is proof that the universe alters when it alteration finds.”

  * * *

  Under Mark’s questioning—especially in the ghost of a classroom still haunting the office—I felt like a truant student facing an oral examination, every query of which was somehow a trick question.

  “Presumably the substructure is a natural feature of space-time,” I explained, “although there are those who think it’s an artifact created by, well, someone.”

  Mark gave his inscrutable inquisitor’s nod-and-smile again.

  “What would you say has been the greatest assurance of the human future, by your lights—and what is the greatest ongoing threat to that future?”

  I had to think about that one for a moment.

  “I’d say control of clewed space has been the greatest assurance, and the Bots the greatest ongoing threat.” A thought suddenly occurred to me—a delayed answer to a much earlier question. “That’s why, after the Bot surprise attacks, the leaders of all the worlds of human space had no choice but to raise a thousand-starship armada and go to war at the Knot.”

  “Very good. But what exactly are the Bots—and why did they launch those attacks?”

  * * *

  From Mark I’ve learned how to reset the traps, pushing the jaws fully open and dogging the trip-pan in each, priming the jaws to snap shut once the pan is depressed by the next creature’s paw. For all I’ve learned, though, I still can’t match Mark for speed or skill or experience with the traps. That may explain why, of the five pi-rats we’ve piled in the bed of the truck by the time we reach Pond 20, four are his work.

  * * *

  “The Knot was our Troy,” Mark said, shoveling, “and Zametis our Helen. I was there for her interrogation. She allowed the Bots to abduct her.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked, splashing a load into the wheelbarrow.

  “Because, despite her webwork witching skills, or maybe because of them. She thought the relatively easy and rapid spread of humanity throughout space by such swift, Raveleran means put off, yet again, our species’ having to face the moral hazard of our shortsightedness, when it comes to fouling our own nest. If we can always fly away to yet more new worlds, we never have to live as if the world in which we live has irreplaceable value in its own right.”

  * * *

  “The Bots are expansionist machine intelligences,” I answered, around a mouthful of my lunch. “There’s a lot of debate about their origin. The V’gerists even claim the origin of the Bots can be found in a human space probe that was altered as a result of an encounter with a distant machine civilization—and the transformed probe was the seed for all the myriad Bots that came after. What is certain, though, is that their spaceships are limited to significantly lower speeds than ours, due to the Bots’ inability to open space-time and weave a Way out of No Way, the way the human Raveleras can.”

  “And that’s why they wanted the Knot and Elena, then?”

  “Yeah. But I still don’t see what it has to do with this handedness you were going on about.”

  * * *

  At Pond 20, Mark finds something odd enough that he takes his long-ashed skankstick from his mouth and waves me over. He holds up the almost-empty trap, to show me.

  “Back on Earth, they’d consider finding these in our traps more proof of our ‘frontier barbarism’—but this ain’t sophisticated Earth, kiddo. One gnawed-off paw is rare enough anyway, but look at this. Two paws, each gnawed off above the wrist.”

  I nod.

  “And they’re both left front paws. From two different animals, caught in the same trap at the same time. Hard to tell, but from the smaller size I bet this one’s from a female, and the larger one is from a male.”

  * * *

  “Maybe the Bots hooked up this prosthetic not just to see how hand and mind cross-reference each other,” Mark said, watching me shovel, “but also to see if a little brute-force cybernetics might jump-start the development of what the Raveleras whisper about. The appearance in time of a ‘Ravelero’ or ‘Ravelator,’ a male human not only capable of making and unmaking clewed space around himself, but a true tripmaster, not bound by the speed of light.”

  * * *

  Mark gestured to the office ceiling to emphasize his point.

  “Because handedness is seen everywhere! From the microcosm to the macrocosm, the quantum scale to the cosmological scale, chirality links it all. The universe is not the same in every direction. It violates parity and funhouses mirror symmetry at every scale. The whole show was born spinning about a preferred axis from the very beginning, and that angular momentum, still conserved after fourteen billion years, shows up in an excess of left-handed, counterclockwise rotating spiral galaxies. The majority of spiral galaxies are lefty-loosey, not righty-tighty!”

  “Whew! Give me some of that skankweed you’ve been smoking, Mark! The whole universe rotating like an ice-skater—that makes my head spin!”

  “As well it should, young man. And I’m not thinking this because I’m smoking that, by the way. The spin is all the way down to the smallest scales—not just galaxies and skaters, but protons and quarks as well. Nuclear beta decays, for instance, violate parity in favor of the left hand, too. The versions of molecules like amino acids found in living things—the biologically relevant versions—are overwhelmingly left-handed on Earth and every Earthlike planet we’ve visited, even though amino acids produced by inorganic reactions are equally split between right-handed and left-handed versions! Even the idea that left-handed molecular dominance, found throughout life on Earth, might itself have been extraterrestrial in origin has been floating around a long time. At least since left-favoring enantiomer imbalances were found on the Murchison meteorite—long predating interstellar travel to extra-solar worlds.”

  “But why should the left hand be favored?”

  * * *

  Mark springs open the trap. He shakes into his cupped right hand the two paws—red-furred hands with disproportionately long fingers and nails.

  “I don’t know much about pi-rat love,” he says, flashing me his lopsided grin again, “but this tells me all I need to know about pi-rat divorce.”

  We laugh. He draws back his hand to hurl the paws into the pond, then stops. He shoves the two small hands into a pocket of his workpants instead.

  * * *

  “Not for naught did we Nauts of the Knot,” Mark sang as he shoveled, “Teach the Bots how dearly bought was everything they stole!”

  He paused to wipe his forehead.

  “You have no idea how many times I sang that song with men and women of the Astronaut Service Guard—now dead, so many of them.”

  * * *

  “One great mystery, lots of great theories!” he said, working his way through his luncherito. “Some say the lopsided favoring of left-handed biological molecules—what the experts call biological homochirality—is the result of slightly different half-lives of biologically relevant molecules, stemming from that beta decay connection. Others say it’s from the preferential destruction of right-handed amino acids by left-circling polarized light, blasting out of rapidly rotating stars in primordial galaxies. Or Mie scattering on aligned interstellar dust particles, triggering the formation of optical isomers in space. F
rom all or whichever of the above, it’s clear the bias in favor of the left hand is not just a local phenomenon.”

  “You called it a bias in favor of left-handedness—yet wasn’t the bias against left-handedness, in almost all the cultures of Old Earth?”

  Mark’s face lit up. He had obviously thought about that, too.

  * * *

  Finding no pi-rats around Ponds 21 and 22—the westernmost, warmest, and smallest ponds in the hatchery—we return to the truck’s cab. From under the driver’s side of the front seat Mark pulls out a beer for himself and one for me, popping the stopper off each brewpak.

  “To the silly songs of human freedom,” he says, thudding his brewpak against mine in toast, “and what it costs to sing them.”

  * * *

  He motioned me over to help him with the wheelbarrow.

  “Alien hand notwithstanding, I returned to duty by the time of the final battle for the Knot. I swear, something about my new situation allowed me, and my troops around me, to be everywhere at once in that battle. It was as if something had changed the hand in the mirror of my mind. Suddenly I could funhouse a universe of mirrors, alter the fundamental info coding of the physical cosmos in my own small, unexpected—and uncontrolled—way. Maybe what the Bots had done to me had done the trick. If so, it was a trick, in my hands and mind, that I could now do to them.”

  Together we pushed the sludge-laden wheelbarrow up the bank.

  * * *

  “Bias? Oh, yes!” he said, distractedly watching me eat the last of my sandwich. “The cultural slight of the left hand goes back to at least the ancient Romans, including the fact that the Latin word for ‘the left side’ was sinister, meaning ‘unlucky,’ among other things, and for ‘the right side’ was dexter, meaning ‘skillful,’ among other things. But you don’t have to engage in much sleight of hand—‘sleight’ from Old Norse meaning ‘sly,’ later ‘deftness’ and ‘dexterity,’ ‘clever tricks’—to see that the sinister hand of letters is the dexter hand of numbers, the sinister hand of numbers is the dexter hand of letters. We’re a tricksy species, lucky in that we’ve been so unlucky, and unlucky in that we’ve been so lucky.”

  * * *

  We drink. Mark retrieves the pi-rat paws from his pants pocket. Taking a length of baling wire from the storage compartment under the dashboard, he makes a loop from the wire. He twists the ends so as to bind the paws together at the wrists, then hangs the whole assemblage from the mirror in the Sun Dog’s cab.

  * * *

  “That’s what the Bots, even in defeat, are still trying to figure out,” he said as, together, we tipped the sludge-barrow’s contents into the truck’s bed. Finished with sludging Pond 7’s kettle at last, we leaned against the truck as he smoked and finished his thought. “How has the twisted mirror of our DNA has allowed human consciousness to be both chiral and chiasmatic, left handed–right brained, right handed–left brained? How that X-ing makes possible the crossing over through all scales, until all scales fall from our eyes and we see that just as the universe is ‘as above, so below,’ so, too, the infinite is closer than it appears in the mirror. There’s no need to be forgiven for Eden and the ‘fall’ into knowledge. No need to be acquitted of crimes never committed.”

  * * *

  “Tricksy?” I asked, crumpling up my lunch wrapper. “Lucky that we’ve been so unlucky? I don’t get that.”

  “We’ve probably been habilis as long as we’ve been Homo—handy as long as we’ve been human. But 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, a chance mutation—some of that same old lucky unlucky—produced a dextral allele involving the FOXP2 gene and the transcription factor POU3F2. The changes arising from that mutation not only affected synaptic plasticity and dendritic trees but also strongly biased handedness in favor of the right hand and control of speech in favor of the left cerebral hemisphere. That chance mutation interacted with an already present alternative allele that was ‘chance’ in another sense—directionally neutral, mirror image, ambidextrous, coin-flip, fifty-fifty.”

  “And that did—what?”

  “The heterozygous form—neutral plus dextral—was evolutionarily advantageous. It improved information storage for learning and storing memories, and consolidated the control of both manual and verbal capabilities in the same hemisphere of the brain. Together with later changes in the regulation of FOXP2 expression, it resulted in a shift from a predominantly gestural to a predominantly vocal form of language—a major speciation event.”

  * * *

  Struck by a sudden idea, Mark laughs and slaps his thigh.

  “Of course!” he says, starting the truck. “Two wrongs don’t make a right, but three lefts do!”

  Gravel crunches beneath the wheels. The paired pi-rat hands, clasped together in inverted and disproportioned prayer, pendulum slowly from the rearview mirror as we bump along. Around us, like a dream the night forgot, the thin snow disappears in the morning suns.

  * * *

  “The intriguing thing about those changes affecting synaptic plasticity, however,” Mark said, finishing his luncherito at last, crumpling its wrapper into a ball, and tossing that ball into the recycling can, “was that they involved right-handed, dextral forms of amino acids—even though our cells make only left-handed forms.”

  “So how does that happen? Doesn’t sound evolutionarily efficient, to me.”

  “Brain cells exploit a trick by making an enzyme that flips the handedness of an amino acid—serine, say—from left-handed L to right-handed D forms, thereby breaking the mirror-symmetry, breaking even of biological homochirality itself. Like breaking the mirror twice, or three times—for better luck, next time. It’s the sort of trick we’re always benefiting from. Never more so than when our peculiarly human form of consciousness arose from the breakdown of the bicamerally specialized mind—when the two ‘sides’ of the mind began to communicate, each by borrowing from the mirror’s other side.”

  “But it’s a delicate balancing act,” I suggested, as neutrally as I could, “this contrariwise pattern-finding?”

  “Yes. Very. I know what you’re thinking again. That’s why so many of us go mad, making impossible connections between implausible dots. And it’s true that too little D-serine in the brain is a cause of schizophrenia, but too much exacerbates stroke damage. Lefty loosey, righty tighty. But I know the difference.”

  * * *

  The sludge-filled Sun Dog moved low and slow as Mark drove it to the hatchery’s compost dump—or ORGANIC NUTRIENT RECYCLING SITE, as the official sign read.

  “Here we are—the Onerous ONRS. Time for you to exit.”

  I got out. He backed the pickup against the biggest pile. I unlatched the tailgate and got out of the way. With a nod Mark floored the accelerator on the pickup. A stinking tsunami of sludge sloshed toward the back of the bed, slammed open the tailgate and flowed out in a great vomitive heave, emptying the truck bed. Mark got out and leaned against the truck.

  “A neat trick,” I said, “and a dirty one, too!”

  “I’ve picked up a few handy tricks on this rock,” he said with a shrug. “A few off it, too.”

  “Such as?

  “Oh, things I learned from my time at the Knot, fighting the Bots. Like the idea that ‘infinite’ does not mean the same as ‘all possible.’ The set of even numbers is infinite, but also inherently incomplete: it contains no odd numbers, excluding all elements of that other infinite set. Odd and even, left and right, infinite yet incomplete. So humility is due.”

  I laughed.

  “Anything not involving numbers?”

  “Just that—as much as being human allows you to—strive to be free, strive to be true. That’s the only wisdom I can offer you. Besides, it’s about time for lunch.”

  * * *

  As we drive, it occurs to me that maybe Mark’s in his right mind and all’s left with the world. If so, I don’t think he will be here tomorrow. I don’t know how I know—I just know. Perhaps he will become the long-awaited R
avelator, stepping through the curtain of space-time, traversing dark light-years in an instant, taking a bow in the starry footlights on the other side of forever. Maybe he will kill himself. Maybe they amount to the same thing. Or not. In any case, this report to you, my unseen audience, ends here, ends now.

  THE PLAY’S THE THING

  Jack McDevitt

  * * *

  Could the research now underway in the field of Artificial Intelligence someday reproduce William Shakespeare? And if a Shakespeare II could be produced, would it be able to write successful dramas?

  That’s what Jack McDevitt’s story is about. But there’s more to it than meets the eye. How would society react to a Shakespeare who is not a human being, but a program in a computer?

  And if Shakespeare could be reproduced, how about Einstein? Or Churchill? Or Hitler?

  * * *

  It had been twenty years since Dennis Colby and I patrolled the outfield for the Explorers. I’d hoped to move on to the Phillies, but you probably know how that turned out. Eventually I came back to LaSalle’s English department, which is how I came to be sitting with the rest of the faculty in Rossi Hall when Dennis received the 2063 Holroyd Award for his work in computer technology, which had initiated advances across every scientific field.

  He didn’t look any older when he ascended to the lectern. His hair was still black and he walked with that same easy stride. He smiled, surveyed the room, and said how glad he was to be back home. “I owe everything to my folks,” he continued, pointing an index finger in their direction, the same gesture he used to make when I was coming to bat in a tight situation. “They were smart enough to send me to LaSalle.” I tried to catch his eye, but he didn’t seem to recognize me. Twenty years can do that to you. I looked nothing like the .300 hitter I’d once been.

  “I’ll never forget this,” he said. “And I have an announcement of my own. Originally, I’d planned to do this a month ago.” He took what looked like a q-pod from a pocket and lifted it so we could all see it. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “we’ve had a major breakthrough. This”—he gazed at the pod—“is the closest thing we’ve had yet to a bona fide artificial intelligence.” He lifted the lid. “Will, say hello to the audience.”